Any cyclist who pedals around San Francisco will soon learn about the Wiggle, a bicycle route that weaves a delightfully flat path across this city of hills.
But the Wiggle, just one mile long, can save cyclists from only so many hills. Soon San Franciscans will have a new option for navigating the local terrain without breaking a sweat or resorting to a car, thanks to a pioneering federally financed electric bike share program that will start up this year.
Rather than zigging and zagging to avoid steep inclines, e-bike users will be able to pedal up and over with help from an electric motor. For those hauling cargo, electric bicycle trailers will be available for hourly rentals, too.
The Federal Highway Administration’s Value Pricing Pilot Program awarded $1.5 million for the initiative through the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency, the project’s fiscal sponsor. Ultimately the money will go to the local nonprofit City CarShare, which plans to integrate the e-bikes and trailers with its existing car sharing service, and to the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at University of California, Berkeley, which is responsible for assessing the impact and lessons learned from the project.
In essence, the goal is to find out how many car-share trips will be replaced with electric bicycle trips, and what factors influence the switch. City CarShare will receive $760,000 of the grant money, covering some 40 percent of the costs over three years for 90 e-bikes at about 25 locations.
The organization plans to roll out 45 bikes in the second half of this year and 45 more by the end of 2013, mostly in San Francisco but in Berkeley as well.
“We think of car sharing as transit,” City CarShare’s chief executive, Rick Hutchinson, said in a telephone interview. Adding e-bikes to the mix gives people another option, he said, making it that much easier to skip driving or ditch vehicle ownership altogether.
“People will go to our site, pull down a list, and see maybe four cars and some electric bikes available for their errand or shopping trip or doctor’s appointment,” he said.
The bikes will be cheaper than the cars. Seeing these options side by side, Mr. Hutchinson said, people who may not have considered biking before may ask themselves, “Could I do this on a bike?”
When it comes to daily travel choices, “we know pricing is important, right after convenience,” he said. “We want to make electric bikes a very convenient alternative.”
Public bike-share programs have become more common in recent years, springing up in Denver, Minneapolis, Washington and New York City. In Europe, London, Paris, Barcelona, and Dublin each have tens of thousands of members in their programs. The San Francisco Bay Area plans to introduce its own regional bike-sharing pilot program this summer.
Of course, car sharing, too, has seen growing popularity: Zipcar now has 650,000 members worldwide, up from around 530,000 a year ago and 250,000 in early 2009.
Electric bike sharing is not entirely new. Last fall, the University of Tennessee launched a small-scale e-bike share program for students. But City CarShare’s concept of offering e-bikes within a traditional car-sharing service is uncharted territory.
Susan Shaheen, director of Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center, said that the hope was that City CarShare could influence bike sharing programs around the world.
The project’s funding was awarded in November as part of the latest $6.7 million round of grants under the Value Pricing Pilot Program, which supports innovative efforts to reduce traffic, pollution and dependence on fossil fuels by using variable pricing. Other projects supported in that round include a pay-as-you-drive insurance program in Massachusetts and a peer-to-peer car-sharing pilot in Portland, Ore., led by Getaround.
City CarShare plans to set the hourly e-bike rate 50 to 70 percent below the rate for cars. Today, members paying a $10 monthly service fee can rent cars for as little as $5 per hour. According to Mr. Hutchinson, pricing will be “at the higher end the longer you keep it, and at the lower end for overnight. It should not be a huge financial burden to keep if it’s getting dark.”
Unlike the regional bike share program, which will allow members to pick up a bicycle at one site and return it at another, the City CarShare program will require round trips.
